Talk:uhta

"The eight stunda"

I was trying to improve Hour and Old English tides over at Wikipedia. The tides article (a) is named tides (i.e., tīd) and not stound (stund) and (b) had a list that didn't match this one at all. The first point is valid: "stound" was far and away less common than "tide" in reference to the unit of time. "Tide" was the standard word for hours and shows up repeatedly in their compound names, like ūhtantīd and nōntīd. The second point—the different list—turned out not to matter, since it was sourced to a random hobby website that Google and Jstor think are the only place that list ever appeared. On the other hand (c) this list turns out not even to have a hobbyist website to back it up. As far as Google can tell, despite a few places copying or referencing Wiktionary, Arkhaeaeon's unsourced list seems to have been made up out of whole cloth.

Bede knew all about the 24 equal hours of the Roman "natural day", but I can't find a single scholarly source or dictionary that suggests the Anglosaxons had any octopartite form of it. It doesn't make much sense that they would: they didn't have hourglasses or waterclocks that would let them reckon night hours well. They use the 3-hour divisions (according to the "artificial hours" of daylight) of the canonical hours... but only during the day. The night "hours" were just vague periods of time "before bed" or "in the early dawn" that were set by when the abbot's guy felt like waking everyone up.

The most authoritative source on Old English, UToronto's comprehensive Dictionary of Old English, doesn't seem to have gotten to the Ses or Ts yet, but Tupper's thorough treatment of Anglosaxon sundials and time; Bosworth's dictionary, its expansion by Toller, and Clark Hall's dictionary all list tid and stund as "hours" and not any sort of set 3-hour period, the canonical hours as such and not set periods, and the night periods vaguely and not as anything set to hours. Those sources are all dated, but it's hard to see how a system of time for this period (used widely enough to merit mentioning here) would have escaped their notice or been recently discovered. Even less likely Google Scholar, Jstor, & al. wouldn't've picked up any hint of them.

Pending some references, the "8 stunda" chart simply seems untrue and need to go. It could be replaced by a vaguer flat list of times of day. It could also be replaced by lists for the canonical hours with general time ranges but there's no real need for that. Those are so well-attested they have numerous synonyms and it's easier to deal with them by just linking to an entry at tīdsang that covers them as hyponyms. — LlywelynII 13:04, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

As a side note, yeah, this means the tides article at Wikipedia also needs an overhaul or merge to English units and the history section of canonical hours. Separate issue, though. — LlywelynII 13:07, 15 March 2017 (UTC)